Tuesday, May 24, 2011

Just the facts? (Finding the truth in news)

"All we want are the facts." -Jack Webb as Joe Friday

Remember, the famous hard-boiled detective Joe Friday from Dragnet played by actor Jack Webb?
Joe Friday was interested in one thing and one thing only…the facts.
Modern news media could take a page or two out of Friday’s fictitious
notebook.

Fox News Channel has been dominating the ratings for news shows for
quite some time with CNN and MSNBC duking it out for the title of
runner-up.

Fox has been raking in the ratings with shows like Glenn Beck, The O’Reilly Factor and On the Record with Greta VanSusteren.

Shows like these are primarily vessels for political commentary with a
dash of topical news. They contain little if no actual facts and yet
people mindlessly tune into such shows and accept everything these
pundits pitch without question.

Beck’s increasingly sensationalist conspiracy theories and rhetoric
have been touted by many as the reason his show has rapidly sunk in the
ratings during the past year and also as the reason why he’s getting the
pink slip from Fox. In 2009 Beck was even punked by an 80 year old Barbara Walters who
called him out on The View with Beck admitting he doesn’t check facts.
Beck himself has also been quoted as saying that he is an “entertainer”
and doesn’t give a “flying crap about the political process.”

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not just Fox and their “Pundit Posse”
that’s guilty of this but Fox does it so often and so outlandishly that
they’ve earned themselves the tongue-in-cheek nickname “Faux News”. They could be forgiven perhaps if the commentary was limited to shows
like Beck, Greta and O’Reilly but the commentary constantly spills over
from the talk shows and gets regurgitated by their actual reporters and
news anchors.

I don’t watch the news because I want to hear about the reporter’s
personal opinions and political leanings, regardless of which way they
go. As a reader or viewer, I want the option of making my own informed opinion but alas, they don’t make it easy these days. The downward spiral of news devolving from hardline reporting into
entertainment news and eventually just entertainment could be marked by
the rise of the internet.

With news now a click away these days and anyone able to report it,
traditional news media have turned to tabloid-esque tactics to keep
people’s attention and advertiser’s dollars. You can’t blame the news media entirely though. If the ratings are any indicator they’re giving the people what they want. However, this errant disregard for fact-checking is becoming all too common inside and outside the world of news media.

In April, Republican Senator Jon Kyl in a battle to reduce federal
funding for Planned Parenthood, took the Senate floor and claimed that
abortion services are “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood
does.”

This fact was quickly disputed and according to Planned Parenthood
abortion related services only accounted for 3% of their yearly total
services provided with 90% of their services being preventative in
nature.

Once this was pointed out a spokesperson for Sen. Kyl quickly
released a statement that the Senator’s remarks were “not intended to be
a factual statement” which was quickly ridiculed by news pundits like Stephen Colbert.

I want to reiterate that it’s not just Republicans or the so-called
right wing media that are guilty of fudging the facts or in some cases
making them up altogether. It’s across the political spectrum.
Democrats are certainly guilty of it too. However, it may be noted that websites like Politifact.org dedicated
to objective, non-biased fact-checking have consistently seen higher
numbers of falsehoods and outright lies coming from the Republican
Party.

Regardless of the numbers though, the point is the lies are coming at us from every side, angle and direction.

Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels was famously quoted as saying,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”
It seems disturbing that a quote from a Nazi would ring so true even today.

At least in America we can count ourselves lucky that we still enjoy
freedom of the press. In many other countries people are cut-off from
the non-filtered news that the rest of us enjoy. In places like Iran,
people risk imprisonment or worse just by attempting to bypass their
government’s strictly enforced internet firewalls.

Back in the “good ole’ days” if the weatherman said the sun was shining you didn’t open the curtains to check if it was true. Nowadays, filtering the truth out of news requires opening the
curtains. Not only do you have to open your curtains but if you want
the whole story you have to open your neighbor’s curtains too.

Jumping from one news site to the next, one might yield stories on
President Obama receiving accolades for a job well done and on the other
you might find scathing claims calling for his impeachment. Both
stories might contain questionable facts, bias or even worse…be
editorials pretending to be real news.

If there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s reporters who editorialize or editorialists who think they’re reporters.

Now, all of this isn’t really anything new really but it’s growing
worse and the line between fact and fiction is getting thinner.

If you’ve actually gotten this far in the article without
disregarding it as “liberal” propaganda you’re probably fairly objective
yourself. It’s getting the “masses” to realize the need for more
objectivity in not only news reporting but news viewing as well that’s
the problem.

You could easily write a thesis on the degeneration of American news
media and journalistic ethics. Heck, you could write a book. I think this is a good start though. My point is simple. If you
accept everything you hear on “the news” at face-value you’re stocking
up on snake oil.

Check the facts…just the facts! If you have to do a little personal
research to get to the truth of an issue, it’s worth it. Don’t rely on
someone else to make up your mind for you.